


We Do What We Must Because We Can

by MorbidOptimist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Auto-Responder| RoLal, Dirk Lalonde - Freeform, Gen, Jake Crocker - Freeform, Jane English - Freeform, Roxy Strider - Freeform, glados references, kid swap, portal influances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-11 00:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7014697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidOptimist/pseuds/MorbidOptimist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxy Strider isn't good enough; luckily, her atuo-responder is kind enough to push her in the right direction, even if they both know she'll never be able to measure up to the real thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Do What We Must Because We Can

“Your mother would have been proud of how graceful you are, floundering around like a kitten caught in a washing machine.”

The feminine mechanical voice laughed, and Roxy could almost make out the sequence LOL layered and repeated over itself from the familiarity of the occurrence alone.

Roxy ignored her and angled her fall to intersect the next fenestrated window, several stories below.

As the window rose up to meet her, she braced herself for the sensation of hitting the void at full force and held her breath.

There was no reason to actually do so, and she was certain her mechanically constructed alter ego would log it away in her file, again, but Roxy was powerless to the force of instinct.

The void always felt crushing when she first entered it, as if the void was trying to mimic the pressure of a great depth of ocean eager to rush inside her lunds and fill her from the inside out.

She had screamed, the first time she had jumped.  

Now, she did little more than shiver, and the pressure of the void quickly drifted away, leaving her lightheaded and restless.

She could already tell that her run was falling short of her desired time.

She grit her teeth and tried not to look at the creatures flickering just outside her range of vision; friends of her mother’s, the ancient denizens of the furthest ring, and although she had tried countless times to accept them as her mother had, they still made something in her very bones twitch and shake with each whisper and flickering tentacle aimed in her direction.

At night, when she could hear nothing but the roar of the ocean surrounding her house, they would sing to her, and Roxy eventually learned not retch at the crooning lullabies that wormed their way into her head through her ears.

She loved them yes, and had felt herself become as enamored by them as she was to the memory of her mother, but they still sickened her to her core, and left her aching for the cruel safety of the sun and the feeling of solid cold metal between her hands.

Soon, another window came into view, beneath her, and Roxy readied her katana.

When she passed through it, she was ready even before she felt the sun beat down on her back and she hit the concrete with all the self-assurance sixteen years of training had given her.

Her mother had left her with the tools to prepare; for what, exactly, she wasn’t sure, but she had been putting them to good use since the day she had been able to lift the sword tucked neatly away in the empty liquor cabinet.  

She was brought out of her internal musings when her blade crossed paths with her opponents, and Roxy swore when the impact reverberated down her arm.

She ducked the incoming swing, sidestepped, and turned to draw one of her own, but her opponent was already gone.

The layered laughter was echoing across the rooftop and the familiar sequence of letters danced before her eyes on the front of her computerized shades.

Roxy ran, jumped through another window, and came to a rolling stop somewhere inside her house; the platform she was standing on was part of a chamber that seemed to overlook the main floor, but there was no way of telling how long the house’s current layout would stick before it changed again.

A red beam on the wall caught her attention; she dodged a spray of bullets, and sliced the small offender in half before the mechanical voice caught her attention again.

“You’re getting sloppy Roxy, what would your mother think? Oh wait, she wouldn’t. Because she’s dead. Isn’t that funny? Your mother’s dead Roxy, which is a good thing really, because she can’t see how you nearly got taken out right there, and by a turret no less,” the voice rambled on in a feminine purr, “I wonder what the great Rose Strider would think, if she could see you now, losing a game of cat and mouse to a pair of glasses and a couple of walking tin cans. Then again, maybe she did see you," she continued, "she was a seer you know; seeing how badly you’ve mangled her surname is probably what really killed her in the end.”

The truth stung, as it always did, but  also as always, Roxy bit down on the pain and used it to push herself forward; she propelled herself down the platform, onto the next, and the one after that, and caught sight of white hair and glossed metal.

“Bring it bitch,” Roxy hissed between clenched teeth; she would fight her mechanical doubles, dismantle them piece by piece. And then she would wipe her auto-responder's virtual smile off of her virtual face, and then maybe, Roxy would cut her training short for the day and call Dirk, providing the boy wasn’t putting on one of his drunken rehearsals for once.

Or maybe, she thought as she depreciated one of her training drones, she should train a little extra; she had let herself get sloppy over the past few days and  if she ever wanted to get back on track, she would have to rectify that, and as quickly as possible.

Chamber after chamber, Roxy jumped, dodged, and decapitated; and in every chamber she made sure to toss a glare at every camera she passed.

She needed her double, yes, but she despised her, too.  

It was petty, and her friends liked to remind her of such, but it was simply too hard for her not hate the best part of herself, when the best part of herself wasn’t even part of her.   

It was hard, and nobody understood.

Not that it was her friends faults of course; Roxy would never burden them with her petty problems like that! She was a good friend and they needed her to be strong for them; she couldn’t let them down. She wouldn’t. 

She had already failed her mother for so long; there was no way she could let herself fail her friends, too.

“I see you’ve like, gotten pretty healthy by the way. Congratulations! I’ll recalibrate some of the platforms to account for the added weight; I’ll just add in a couple of zeros… Don't worry about it.”

Her voice trailed into laughter again and Roxy paled; she recalled the extra snacks she had eaten during the past few days and panic flooded her veins. Was the food to blame for the delay in her fight responses or was her double just trying to unbalance her?

She couldn’t risk it; she would have to keep better track of her dietary intake from now on; she was sixteen now! Not a six year old prone to temper tantrums and selfishness.

She needed to stay strong; a cutting edge.

She needed to make her mother proud.

She would never honor her memory if she kept it up at this rate; Roxy swore.

“Add another testing track to today’s schedule,” she ordered.

“I love how you assume you can just order people around; you’re such a good decision maker, You’d be a good businessman if it weren't for the fact that you’re not a man, and you know, a dangerous selectively mute psychopath with a sword.”

Roxy pushed on until her lungs burned and body ached; she couldn’t make up lost time, but she could push her endurance, at least.

“Forgive me, that’s an overstatement, like, you’re about as dangerous as a real wizard, with a wand! Very dangerous, except for the fact that they’re fake. Not real at all. Even your mother said so. It’s in her file, it says right there, 'Magic isn’t real’ and look, it also says that you’re a disappointment. I wasn’t even looking for that. How funny.”

She hoped to every wizard god in existence that her ego wasn’t planning on revealing her true personality to their friends; they could never know. They could _never_ fucking know.   

Roxy pushed herself harder; the better she did the less likely her secrets would be exposed. All she had to do was make it to the central chamber and hit the button. All she had to do was improve her score. All she had to do was make certain that her mechanical twin was satisfied with her progress. She just had to do better. Be better.

She was _so_ close.  

She _had_ to be.

“About that last thing I said?  Yeah, I was worried it went over your head there; when I said that magic isn't real, I implied that you are also not real. As in, you are a two faced, deceitful, manipulator. For a genius, you aren’t very clever so I figured I should apologize and spell it out for you, just in case you missed it. Lol, spell it out. Like wizards, you get it? Oh, nevermind… Talking with you is like talking with a toaster, only toasters make interesting noises from time to time, which makes toasters objectively better than you.”

Another crack at her relationship with her friends! Her brow furrowed; had she missed something? Was one of her friends upset? Was Dirk unconscious next to his bro’s creepy puppet again? Had she misspoken to Jake? Insulted his love of baked goods too much? Was Jane upset with her? Was she hurt? Had her island finally forsaken her while she had been busy running herself ragged on the testing course like an asshole and missed her final desperate cry for help?

She opened pesterchum on her shades and quickly scanned through the logs; she couldn’t find anything out of ordinary with her friends, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t missed something. She would have to study them in depth later; her mother had produced countless cartoons about politics, psychology, and wizards. Roxy hadn’t inherited her mother’s knack of psychoanalysis, much to her frustration, and Dirk seemed to possess a knack for it which only frustrated her further; she would have to suck it up and ask her double for assistance in figuring where she had fucked up with her friends.  

Friendship was so hard.

Her attention was caught by a shiny red button in the middle of the room.

It wasn’t guarded or trapped in anyway, and Roxy knew it was because her creation doubted she handle anything more than this test for babies.

She swallowed her pride and hit the button.

A monitor lit up to her left and she was greeted to the sight of her own face. Well, almost her own face. She had programmed her to be older, more mature looking; someone who looked like a woman her mother might respect. Be proud of. Roxy would never look as perfect, or sound as sultry; she would never be as good with her friends or with numbers as her either.

It would be impossible to measure up to her in any category, and once Dirk had managed to pull himself together long enough to build her a functional body, Roxy would lose that advantage over her too.

“RoLal.”

“Roxy,” she replied; her grin was too wide, and her virtual body was alight with tiny pathways of flickering light.

“How’d I do?”

“I ran the numbers, and honey, let me tell you, you do _not_ want to quit your day job.”

Roxy bit her lip, dry swallowed, and nodded.

“You should get cleaned up. I’m grateful that I don’t possess any actual orifices because I’m certain you stink worse than Jane’s sweat socks right now. It’s the little things in life like that that keep me going.”

Roxy thrust her sword back into her sylladex and walked out of the door RoLal lit up for her.

She was exhausted.

She opened her chat and asked RoLal to talk with her friends; she was simply too sore and too tired to stay up much longer.

Her virtual doppleganger replied with a series of catface emoji; Roxy switched her shades back off when the chat filled with textual laughter.

She would test again tomorrow.

Maybe she’d finally do better then and make her mother proud.

She doubted it, highly, but she had to try. 

After all, what else could a Strider do?

Striders did what they had to do, because they were the only ones who could. 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I figured that roxy strider would get pretty cynical & self-deprivational underneath the friendly cool kid exterior she fronts to her friends.


End file.
